Africa's World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe

by Gerard Prunier

  • Antoine Sibomana, bourgmestre of Mbazi commune, has protected many Tutsi during the genocide and saved the children of the Hutu Human Rights activist Monique Mujawamaliya. When the fighting gets close to his hill he shepherds his whole flock to Burundi. Contacted there by agents of the new government who tell him they know of his honorable behavior, he comes back with his people. He is arrested three days later with no reason given.10

  • A Hutu peasant and his Tutsi wife have both managed to survive the genocide. After the RPF victory Tutsi extremists come to their hill and threaten him. He and his wife run for safety to an internally displaced persons (IDP) camp near Kibungo. There she is killed by Hutu extremists who accuse her of being “a government spy.”11

  The list could be almost endless. Genocide was so intertwined with everyday life that it could be used at every turn to secure an economic advantage, to settle an old grudge or to cover one’s tracks.12 Many people were killed by former Interahamwe simply because they might give evidence against them.13 Other people quickly found out that having survived the genocide could be a profitable business. They created “accusation cooperatives,” which would sell their denunciations of real or supposed Interahamwe activities to those who could use such testimonies for economic or political benefit. In January 1995 two hapless Angolan businessmen who were so denounced ended up in jail under the accusation of being “mercenary militiamen” because somebody wanted their dollars.14 There were many young women and girls pregnant from rape by Hutu killers trying to arrange for abortions, which the collapsed medical system was unable to provide. Tutsi survivors, called bapfuye buhagazi (“walking dead”) by the diaspora Tutsi who had come back, were often looked on with suspicion. They were caught in a nightmarish world between their Hutu neighbors, some of whom had been their saviors and some who had tried to murder them, and strange returnees from abroad who often accused them of compromising with the killers in order to save their lives. As for Hutu survivors, they were looked on as génocidaires by the returnee Tutsi and as traitors by the sympathizers of the old regime.15 Nobody was automatically innocent, and suspicion was everywhere. Worse, there was very little solidarity between Hutu and Tutsi survivors. Widows’ associations, mainly Tutsi, at times refused to let Hutu widows join, especially if the dead husband had been a Hutu. The first anniversary of the genocide in April 1995 clearly showed that some in the new regime were intent upon getting as much political capital as they could out of the occasion, and Hutu survivors were marginalized. The “Tutsification” of the genocide thus subtly started to turn it exactly into what its perpetrators had intended it to be: an ethnic rather than a political massacre.16

  The civilian returnees themselves, although in a better spiritual position, soon found out that life in postgenocide Rwanda was anything but normal. While in exile they had maintained a sense of unity that was fostered by their common situation. RPF consciousness raising and the hopes and fears linked with the war had reinforced this impression. Now, having “returned” to a country many of them did not know, they were confronted with the triple conundrum of dead relatives, limited economic opportunities, and cultural strangeness. They were discovering that, paradoxically, Tutsi survivors often had more in common with their Hutu neighbors than with themselves. They started to divide and quarrel according to their synthetic “tribes of exile,” that is, the countries where they had spent their years away from Rwanda. There were “Zairians,” “Burundians,” “Tanzanians,” and “Ugandans,” as well as those from more exotic places not ranking high enough in terms of returnee numbers to constitute a serious network of solidarity. If these distinctions did not matter too much in daily life, they mattered a lot as soon as politics, business, or the military was involved. Networks and mafias emerged, struggling for political control and economic advantage in the midst of the ruins. The biggest fish in that dangerous pond was of course the Rwandese Patriotic Army (RPA) itself, the armed branch of the RPF. The RPA leadership was mostly “Ugandan,” a fact that was to acquire growing importance as the political and military situation in the region progressively slipped into further disintegration.

  Most of the Hutu who had stayed in the country were there because they had not managed to run away in time.17 Because many sympathizers of the opposition parties had been killed and many of the Interahamwe followers were in exile, the remaining Hutu population belonged to that vast middle ground that is the mainstay of any civil society. But in Rwanda “middle ground” did not mean moderates. Years of relentless political propaganda had taken their toll and most people displayed an attitude of sullen resentment toward the new government. It was perceived as a conquerors’ regime, not as a legitimate one. Many Hutu showed little or no sensitivity toward what had just happened and equated their own real but limited plight with the massive horrors suffered by the Tutsi. Some even denied that any genocide had taken place at all and attributed the many deaths to “the war.” Incredibly gross remarks could be heard, such as that of a Hutu woman walking by a heap of decomposing corpses and snarling, “Why don’t they clean up this mess? It stinks.” Because this was at a time when “Tutsi fundamentalists” were organizing solemn reburial ceremonies of abandoned corpses, it did not augur well for any policy of national reconciliation.

  This poisoned spiritual climate was made even worse by the state of material chaos in which the country was plunged. The former government had fled to Zaire, taking all the money from the Central Bank and herding into exile approximately 2.1 million people (out of a postgenocide population of about 6.9 million) as an immediate human buffer and a future political pawn in case of negotiations. In the south of the country there were over 500,000 people living in IDP camps left over from the so-called Safe Humanitarian Zone created by the French during Operation Turquoise and perhaps another 500,000 living wherever the war had pushed them. This left about 3.6 million people living in roughly “normal” conditions, that is, only 45 percent of the prewar population. Given the extremely fertile nature of the Rwandese soil, food was not too much of a problem. But transport was, as most vehicles had been either destroyed or taken to Zaire by retreating government forces. In the midst of the general confusion, over 700,000 Tutsi from the diaspora were in the process of coming back from their countries of exile, those from Uganda bringing with them vast quantities of cattle (probably about one million head), which started to invade the Mutara area and even the Akagera National Park, competing for grazing space with the wildlife. Empty houses and even unoccupied farms were taken over by the newcomers, who assumed that all those who had gone into exile were génocidaires. One of the reasons for the fierce competition for urban properties was that the “old caseload refugees”—the Tutsi returnees coming from abroad—were sociologically quite different from the victims of the genocide. Roughly the same numbers came back (around 700,000) as had been killed (800,000). But the victims had been ordinary Rwandese, with a majority of rural dwellers. The newcomers were not peasants; they had lived in exile in situations where access to land was restricted, and many of them had no experience in agriculture. Furthermore, the notion of being isolated in the hills surrounded by a majority of Hutu, right after the genocide, was not very appealing. So they tended to congregate in the towns and to look for and monopolize the moneyed jobs. These were not high-paying jobs since there were not enough of those to go around anyway. Returnees would take any salaried job, and this meant pushing the Hutu out of the towns—and out of the jobs. This contributed to further social tensions in the country. To make things worse, over 150,000 houses had been destroyed, and even without any illegal occupations there would not have been enough houses to go around. There were also nearly 300,000 children without parents, both “unaccompanied minors” floating around and survivors in “minor-headed households” on the farms, living lives of incredible fear and loneliness, at times miles away from the nearest adult. Most of the police were dead or had fled abroad with the former government. So had most of the judges, schoolteachers, doctors,
and nurses. The various ministries had only a skeleton staff left, and even the churches, which were full of dead bodies, were closed. The majority Catholic Church, which should have provided some form of moral guidance in the midst of the disaster, was in fact deeply tainted by the genocide. The Church hierarchy had been very close to the former regime and it remained unrepentant after the genocide, in spite of its sullied record.18 Many Hutu priests had refused to help not only lay Tutsi but even their fellow Tutsi clergy members. Nuns running orphanages and schools had delivered their Tutsi charges to the killers and pushed Tutsi sisters out of the community and to their deaths. Church buildings that had been considered places of refuge had become tombs, one priest going even as far as organizing the destruction of his own church with a bulldozer, burying under its ruins a packed group of Tutsi refugees whom the killers had not managed to extricate from the building. Some priests who had fled to Goma were bold enough to write to Pope John Paul II,

  The population fears to fall back into the pre-1959 slavery… . This is a vast plot prepared a long time ago… . It is an anti-Catholic movement supported by some priests who work with the RPF. Some have become Muslims and others dug mass graves financed by the RPF… . This explains the anger of the people… . Let us forget about this International Tribunal where the criminals will be both prosecutors and judges.19

  The accusation that the Hutu were in fact the victims and not the perpetrators of the genocide was common in Church circles, which helped support some of the early revisionist propaganda churned out by friends of the former government. The Catholic Church was using the fact that about half of its clergy had been killed to wrap itself in martyrs’ shrouds, omitting to say that most of the victims were Tutsi and that the Hutu priests who were killed trying to protect their flocks were often considered traitors by their fellow Hutu clerics. The Anglican Church, although much smaller than its Catholic counterpart, was just as compromised in the genocide. But perhaps due to the more critical tradition of Protestantism it was the only Church to do an honest bit of soul-searching and try to understand what had happened, questioning its type of evangelization, its relationship with the regime, and its weaknesses on the ethnic question.20

  In such a landscape of almost total misery and destruction the attitude of the new government was critical, in moral as well as practical terms. And that too was soon going to add another disquieting dimension to the knot of problems Rwanda had become.

  The politics of national unity

  The government that was inaugurated on July 19, 1994, was a genuine government of national unity. It was fully in the spirit of the Arusha Peace Agreements of August 1993 which the génocidaire regime had sought to destroy. The new president, Pasteur Bizimungu, was an RPF Hutu who had been a government civil servant in the 1980s. Of the twenty-one ministries, the lion’s share (eight) had gone to the RPF; the rest were evenly distributed, with four ministries going to the Mouvement Démocratique Républicain (MDR; the main opposition party under the former government), three to the Parti Social Démocrate (PSD), three to the Liberals, two to independent personalities, and one to the small Christian Democratic Party. In ethnic terms fifteen of the new ministers were Hutu and only six were Tutsi. After such a catastrophe the new cabinet looked like a small miracle of reason in a sea of madness.

  But the international community was not entirely happy with the new cabinet and there was pressure for a “broadening of the political base” before any form of economic aid could be resumed. Of course this pressure came mostly from Belgium and from the Social Christian Party, which had been very close to the Habyarimana regime. But the U.S. government, various international bodies, and even the UN kept harping on the same theme. It was obvious that “broadening” meant “get more former government Hutu onboard.” The advice was ambiguous, a bit like asking Bundeskanzler Konrad Adenauer in 1949 to include former Nazis in his government for the sake of national reconciliation. But Seth Sendashonga, an RPF Hutu and the minister of the interior, got a green light from Gen. Paul Kagame, the vice president, minister of defense, and regime strongman, for cautious “broadening.” Since it was out of the question to negotiate with the génocidaires, Sendashonga tried dealing with former prime minister Sylvestre Nsanzimana and former minister of agriculture James Gasana. Neither of them had had anything to do with the genocide, but both refused cabinet positions out of political caution. Insisting on the “political broadening” of the national unity government as a precondition for resumption of economic aid was a narrow obsession, given the global nature of the catastrophe.21 Financial help was absurdly stuck on technicalities, and although $1 billion in humanitarian aid had been pledged, it was impossible to find $4.5 million to pay Rwanda’s arrears to the World Bank in order to release $250 million in available loans.22 It was the European Union that unilaterally broke the deadlock in November 1994 by giving $88 million without preconditions.23

  Indeed, the question of economic aid could not be separated from political considerations. But the problem was not the “broadening” that the international community blindly kept insisting on during those early days. Having “moderate criminals” in government would not have helped very much. But there were other, very serious concerns that had started to develop almost from day one within the government of national unity itself, and those were definitely not addressed by the international community.

  In November 1994 the MDR, the main RPF coalition partner in the cabinet, published a radically critical report on the general situation.24 It made eight fundamental points of varying importance: (1) the fundamental law had been violated because the transitional government period of existence had been set at five years instead of a maximum of two; (2) the “new army,” which was supposed to be born out of a fusion of mostly Tutsi RPA elements and new recruits, was very slow in coming together; (3) there was no separation of powers, and the executive acted independently from Parliament; (4) the RPF should clarify its juridical status, whether as a party or as something else; (5) tribunals should quickly be set up to try those responsible for the genocide; (6) a stop must be put to illegal property seizures; (7) a stop must be put to arbitrary detentions and murders, especially in military camps; and (8) there should be a commission of inquiry to check the growing talk about a double genocide.

  The first point was clearly self-serving: as a mainstream party the MDR could count on a good share of the Hutu vote, and it was trying its luck at pushing an obviously premature electoral agenda. Points 2, 3, and 4 were more serious since they dealt with the way the new Rwanda was supposed to work: an ethnic army, a towering executive, and an overwhelming RPF were not recipes for even embryonic forms of democracy. Of course, democracy was itself a loaded word in the Tutsi-Hutu context,25 and the MDR’s “innocent” appeal to the ballot box was far from free of ethnic calculations. So was the RPF’s refusal to address the problem. Points 5 and 6 were even more serious because arrests, which had started in a haphazard way in July, kept happening but without getting more organized. Gutunga agatoki, “pointing the finger,” was still the dominant mode of bringing about charges. Detainees were shoved into the jails, and when those were full they were pushed into any available closed space, including metallic containers for cargo, with tiny air vents and no toilets, where many died of suffocation and diseases. From 1,000 prisoners in August 1994 the numbers had risen to 6,000 at the end of the year and kept growing exponentially to reach 23,000 by March 1995.26

  The judicial system was in ruins. Justice Minister Alphonse-Marie Nkubito had only one telephone line and two typewriters in his office. But a strange feeling was beginning to develop among the Hutu ministers in the cabinet: that the RPF was in no hurry to push for quick justice and that it wished to maintain full political control over justice proceedings. On October 28, 1994, the Rwandese delegation in New York presented a memo to the UN Security Council in which it tried to stop the creation of an international tribunal of justice for the genocide and asked instead for the creation of a nat
ional one. It also asked that war crimes be excluded from its mandate to avoid too close scrutiny of its own postgenocide behavior.27 As for illegal property occupations, they were a major source of strife, and more and more people kept getting arrested as génocidaires over what were in fact real estate disputes.

  But it was of course points 7 and 8 that were the gravest. About those the MDR document did not mince words: “In order for agricultural work to start again we must control insecurity which prevents the peasants from working in their fields since they are not even sure of being alive the next day.” Point 8 about a “double genocide” was beginning to be bandied around as Hutu extremists in exile eagerly seized on rumors of RPF killings to confuse issues and develop a revisionist argument.28 Nevertheless, the RPF did not seem very eager to have a thorough inquiry throw a clarifying light on the situation. Prime Minister Faustin Twagiramungu was extremely worried and soon returned to the subject in a public broadcast wherein he both accepted blame and begged his fellow countrymen to calm down: “We cannot deny that we have not provided security… . People are still being killed like by the earlier ones [i.e., the MRND]… . We are all angry. But we cannot take spears and machetes and keep killing one another.”29

  Soon the subject had become so controversial that the prime minister and General Kagame agreed to a public debate to clarify the situation. It did not help much, since neither wavered on his position, Twagiramungu denouncing the insecurity and Kagame “defending the honour of the Army.”30 There was a slight drop in the arrest rate following the debate, but then it picked up again. And although the government of national unity managed to stay together, the tension kept growing, unabated. It was around that time that General Kagame gave a long interview to the Belgian newspaper Le Soir which is worth quoting at length because all the main themes of the period are present: